


Birth

by DarkQueenSigyn



Series: Hereditary Oneshots [1]
Category: Hereditary (2018)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, as well as reclaim it so i can stop being so damn scared of it, big warning for pregnancy and childbirth, mildly graphic descriptions of childbirth, there is so much foreshadowing that you'll only pick up on if you've seen the film, this is my attempt to make sense of this movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 04:36:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15089120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkQueenSigyn/pseuds/DarkQueenSigyn
Summary: A oneshot exploring the experience of the Graham family while Annie was pregnant with Charlie, and during the experience of Charlie's birth. Likely the first in a series of Hereditary oneshots.





	Birth

The whole time Annie was pregnant with Charlie, Ellen had been so certain that she was going to be a boy.

“He’s going to be so strong,” she would say. “He’ll be absolutely perfect.”

These were only natural things that a grandmother-to-be would say, but there was always something...sinister about the way she said them. Something that just rubbed Annie the wrong way. 

“You know, it could be a girl,” Annie had pointed out once.

Ellen had only given this peculiar little laugh in response, and said nothing.

Even more unsettling still was how much Ellen doted on Annie and her unborn child, taking an almost inappropriate amount of interest in how the baby was developing; and even immediately dropping what she had been doing and rushing to feel for herself the first time Annie felt the baby move.

“Promise me you’ll name him after your brother,” Ellen whispered one day, so desperately that it had startled and unnerved Annie so much she couldn’t respond.

Her mother hovered over her so frequently during her pregnancy, that Annie made a point of distancing young Peter from his grandmother even more than usual. Peter was only four, and seemingly had less than no interest in his future baby sibling, beyond a reasonable amount of innocent intrigue.

One night, as Steve was tucking him into bed, Peter asked if Mommy had “a monster in her belly.”

Steve had laughed it off at the time, and that was more or less the extent of Peter’s curiosity for the duration of Annie’s pregnancy.

Annie had always been told that your first time giving birth is always the hardest, and it gets easier with your second.

In her case, however, this could not have been further from the truth.

For the emotional rollercoaster that had led up to it, the painfully long pregnancy, Peter’s birth had been fairly straightforward; even though he was so overdue that they’d had to have the birth induced.

Charlie’s birth was a waking nightmare.

From the moment Annie’s water broke, she was in pure, unbridled agony. The pain had dropped her to her knees on the floor, doubled over as she wrapped her arms around her swollen stomach and screamed at the top of her lungs.

“Something’s wrong,” she sobbed in Steve’s arms, as he gathered her up as best he could to take her to the hospital. “It’s not supposed to be like this!”

Ellen, on the other hand, had remained remarkably cheerful throughout the entire experience, taking it upon herself to take her daughter to the hospital; while Steve brought Peter in their other car. He hadn’t expecting his second child’s birth to be quite so harrowing, so the last-minute decision had been made to try not to expose little Peter to the extent of his mother’s suffering.

The trip to the hospital was terrifying for everyone involved, and yet once they got there, Annie’s labour didn’t take long at all. It was as if she had little to no control over her own experience of this childbirth, and Charlie herself was the one deciding when and how she came into the world.

When she was finally born, she didn’t cry. She didn’t make a single sound.

“Oh, God,” Annie cried, tears and sweat streaming down her face. For a sick, paralyzing moment, she thought her child was stillborn. “Oh, God, no, not like this…”

She was crying so hard, and shaking so much, that she hid her face in her husband’s shoulder as the doctor handed little Charlie to her grandmother.

“Annie, it’s okay,” Steve whispered. “It’s okay. Look.”

Annie picked her head up, and saw her mother’s face, before she finally saw her healthy, softly breathing baby girl.

For the first time that day, Ellen looked a little...disappointed.

“It’s a girl,” she said, almost apologetically.

Annie was so stunned, she could barely speak at first. She sat up slowly, staring down at her baby girl’s face as Ellen placed her in her arms. 

Slowly, Annie began to laugh, and a smile spread across her face.

“Look at her,” she breathed. “Steve, look.”

Steve could only smile from ear to ear, an arm still wrapped around his wife.

“She’s so beautiful,” Annie said, and this time started to cry tears of joy.

The couple spent a long moment just watching their newborn daughter breathe, so overwhelmed with happiness neither of them would think until later about how peculiar it was that she didn’t cry at all when she was born.

“I just realized something,” Steve murmured. “We never did pick a girl name, did we?”

Annie laughed again. “You’re right,” she said. “Oh, my God, you’re right, we didn’t.”

Ellen, for once, was silent, just standing to one side and watching her daughter in that moment.

“Well, that’s okay,” Annie decided. “We can still call her Charlie.”

From where she was standing, Ellen smiled.


End file.
